Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Charlie Jane Anders

Hardcover

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Pre-order: Ships Aug 19th, 2025

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In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie's busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

Book Details

Publisher: Tor Books
Publish Date: Aug 19th, 2025
Pages: 320
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9781250867322
Categories: • Fantasy - Contemporary• Literary• Romance - LGBTQ+ - General

About the Author

Anders, Charlie Jane: - Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, coming August 2025 from Tor Books. Her other novels include All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She's also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can't Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She's won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she's currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Praise for this book

"Lessons in Magic and Disaster will conjure a wickedly brilliant spell on its readers in this tale about witchcraft, queer wisdom, and the pain and powers of womanhood at any age, written by one of our most wildly imaginative writers, Charlie Jane Anders."--Amber Tamblyn, author of Listening in the Dark: Women reclaiming the Power of Intuition

"Charlie Jane Anders always goes a step further." --Jonathan Lethem, bestselling and award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn

Praise for The City in the Middle of the Night

"A breathtaking work of imagination and storytelling... making the case for Anders as this generation's Le Guin." --Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

"Like a classic from another timeline... This book has notes of Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip Pullman." --Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

"An intimate portrait of people as much as it is a piece of culturally aware social scifi -- a look at our moment in history through a distorting lens of aliens and spaceships." --NPR

"Classic SF in the mode of Ursula K Le Guin or Octavia Butler....This is a millennial's novel, featuring young people trying to make their way through an uncaring, corrupt and intermittently violent world....Heartfelt and absorbing fiction." --The Guardian

"Anders has written a unique book, one that uses tropes found in old-school science fiction to comment on modern side effects of class structures." --Washington Post

"Original and gripping...The City in the Middle of the Night may be set light-years away, but it's likely to hit too close to home." --Paste

"An even stronger novel than Anders' Nebula Award-winning All the Birds in the Sky; a tale that can stand beside such enduring works as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Dan Simmons' Hyperion." --Booklist, starred review

"Intricate, embracing much of what makes a grand adventure: smugglers, revolutionaries, pirates, camaraderie, personal sacrifice, wondrous discovery, and the struggle to find light in the darkness. Breathlessly exciting and thought-provoking." --Publishers Weekly, starred review